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Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, his wife Heidi, and their two daughters Catherine, 4, left, and Caroline, 6, right, wave on stage after he announced his campaign for president at Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va. Cruz is the first major candidate to officially enter the 2016 race for president.AP

Well, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming.

The 2016 race is officially underway now that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is the first major GOP to formally announce his desire to be president.

Cruz’s candidacy could be a problem for moderate conservatives who are still stinging from the failed White House bids of Sen. John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. With no Democratic incumbent, the GOP has a strong chance to reclaim the White House if they don’t fumble the opportunity. To me, fumbling is going too far right into Ted Cruz land.

Cruz could grab the nomination since primary voters are more conservative than the general electorate. But the ballgame is the White House and a person so divisive within his own party and the broader electorate is the wrong standard bearer. In his announcement, he spoke directly to conservatives, without so much as a sign that he would work with the moderate wing of his party.

Conservatives often talk about the struggle between Tea Party conservatives and traditional economic Republicans as a battle for the soul of the GOP. It is real. With Cruz in the race, moderate economic conservatives will feel pressure to take harder lines on issues that require compromise and leadership. And that could leave the eventual standard bearer in the same position as Mitt Romney — an inconsistent muddle of views as they try to reconnect with the all important middle ground independent voters who swing elections.

Cruz will face questions about whether he has solutions or just a gift to criticize. But he also is likely to get hit with the lack of experience arguments that Clinton backers and conservatives made against Barack Obama, another youthful senator, eight years ago.

While Obama presented a limited track record and a lot of rhetorical hope, Cruz comes off as an angry impulsive man whose filibuster and government shutdown moves seem to underscore that persona. He’s made a lot of adversaries within his own party among veteran lawmakers who felt he put them out on limbs and sawed them off several times.

Still, if history matters, the first person into the race usually doesn’t emerge as the party’s nominee. But Cruz has an excited Tea Party base that will prod Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, Scott Walker and others more to the right on all of the hot-button issues, such as immigration, Obamacare, and budget, spending and debt. The danger, of course is that a winning primary strategy isn’t a winning national campaign.

Campaigns are won by ground games and money. It will interesting to see whether Cruz can score big in both areas against Bush and Walker, the unannounced presumed front-runners.

It’s one thing to be a firebrand senator who represents a rootin’, tootin’ state that prides itself on independence and brashness. It’s another thing entirely to vie for the nation’s top office and represent the interests of a vast and varied array of people. The president of the United States does not serve one single issue or one small group of people. He or she serves and represents the nation.

Sen. Ted Cruz is about to get a cold dose of reality as he competes for the hearts and minds of the nation’s Republicans in hopes of winning their presidential-nomination vote. Just among Republicans, the political alignment and interests are wide and varied. Only a relatively small percentage of Republicans support the tea party and share the extreme views of Cruz and his base.

Cruz is going to have to appeal to a broader range of Republicans if he wants to avoid having his candidacy turn into a short-lived national joke. I don’t doubt his ability to raise funds for a serious run. But he will have to do more. He’s going to have to learn how to listen. And he can no longer rely on criticism of mainstream Republicans and all Democrats as his political platform. Criticism sounds great, especially on the Senate floor and in campaign stops. But when voters are choosing their president, they look for someone with solutions, not just complaints. Continue reading →

From left: Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) arrive to speak during a news conference on Capitol Hill. The White House says an open letter signed by Senate Republicans and sent to Iranian leadership, skirts the Constitution and sends a dangerous and conflicting message. Drew Angerer/The New York Times

Dear GOP Senators,

I’m writing you to ask the question that I think is on the mind of most Americans. What the heck were you thinking?

Iran is not exactly the kind of pen pal I’d like to have. As you know, the Iranian leadership has played hide-the-pea with several administrations and Congresses over its nuclear desires. I can’t say that sanctions, harsh words (remember former President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” comment), and just about everything else the U.S. has tried has persuaded Tehran to give up their nuclear ambitions. Now I’m sure your threatening missive addressed to the Leaders of Iran will make all the difference. Guess that’s better than addressing it to “whom it may concern at Axis of Evil.”

I can make a case that the Obama administration could do more to keep the Congress in the loop. But I learned in school that diplomacy was fundamentally an executive branch function. Not exclusively an executive branch responsibility, of course, but mostly a job for the occupant of the Oval Office and the executive team. I don’t know what makes 37-year-old freshman Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas draft, and most the GOP senators, including our two guys from Texas, think it is proper to sign a letter to Tehran that makes it clear that the Congress is eager to derail President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry and any deal with Iran, sight unseen.

I would not find the President’s veto of the Keystone XL pipeline so off kilter if the process itself were on kilter. It wasn’t.

This project was studied and studied and studied again — with the sole purpose of slow walking it into limbo. It worked. No one can tell you what the next step will be. And if I were sitting on the Canadian side of the border, I’d be distressed by the lack of forthrightness every step of the way.

Put aside the claims of 42,000 jobs. That’s always been overstated. Those jobs would never have been permanent jobs. Focus on the fact that oil and gas will be part of the global energy mix, and shipping through pipelines is much safer than by rail through the heart of small towns all over America. Prime case: the recent derailment in West Virginia.

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkanasas governor turned talk show host and perennial presidential candidate, is apparently now running for the title of America’s parenting coach. Move over, Benjamin Spock.

Huckabee, while huckstering his new book, said in an interview with PEOPLE magazine that Barack and Michelle Obama “are excellent and exemplary parents in many ways.”

If only he’d stopped there.

He went on to question the first daughters’ choice in music (they like Beyoncé) and the Obamas’ tolerance of said choice. The ordained Southern Baptist preacher wrote in his book that Queen Bey spreads “obnoxious and toxic mental poison in the form of song lyrics” and dance moves “best left for the privacy of her bedroom.”

Now, let’s forget the wrongheadedness of supposing to parent someone else’s kids. Forget the meanness, as my colleague Jim Mitchell wrote, of dragging the Obama daughters into the political arena.

Let’s focus instead on Huckabee, the bassist in Capitol Offense, which is more than your average white band of middle-aged rockers. They’ve opened for big names, from Willie Nelson to REO Speedwagon (Wait, they’re still around?).

In a 2007 campaign interview with Making Music magazine, Huckabee said he got his first electric guitar at age 11 and worked hard, practicing constantly to emulate “his idols:” The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Grand Funk Railroad. He credited the music to giving him the strength to “overcome an almost crippling shyness.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m shocked by the parenting this guy must have been subjected to back in Hope, Ark., with all due respect to the late Dorsey and Mae Huckabee. They surely were “excellent and exemplary parents in many ways,” but seriously, The Beatles? What did they think “Please Please Me” was about? Who was that Foxey Lady Jimi took home through a Purple Haze? Little 11-year-old Mikey was in his bedroom practicing andmemorizing that stuff.

And Grand Funk Railroad. Please. It’s filthy garbage. That American Band was partying it down! Read it for yourself (but don’t let your kids):

Four young chiquitas in Omaha

Waitin’ for the band to return from the show

Feelin’ good, feelin’ right, it’s Saturday night

The hotel detective, he was outta sight

Now these fine ladies, they had a plan

They was out to meet the boys in the band

They said, “Come on dudes, let’s get it on”

And we proceeded to tear that hotel down

Huckabee was spot on in telling PEOPLE: “I don’t understand how on one hand they can be such doting parents and so careful about the intake of everything – how much broccoli they eat and where they go to school and making sure they’re kind of sheltered and shielded from so many things – and yet they don’t see anything that might not be suitable for either a preteen or a teen in some of the lyrical content.”

It’s disgraceful. I’m going right home and erasing all the music from my kids’ iPhones.

A few years, a presidential administration and a political party ago, your local editorial board was reasonably horrified at the power a single adviser, one of those stop-at-nothing political guys, was accumulating in the White House.

You remember Karl Rove, right? The board, to oversimply, was willing to tolerate him because every political campaign has one of those guys. Rove was good at it, too, at least enough to help George W. Bush reach the presidency in 2000 and 2004.

After that re-election was when Rove began taking on more and more responsibility as a deputy chief of staff — in effect, a political hack masquerading as a policy guy, as some of my colleagues grumbled, probably more enamored of policy guys than I. And your local editorial board took some delight in putting the boot to Rove’s behind as he left Washington in August 2007, bipartisan mob close behind (sorry, no link available):

The president has been fiercely criticized for valuing political loyalty over governing competence in making key administration appointments. History may reveal that the worst call he made in this regard was to allow a gifted political guru to morph into a top policy strategist.

Mr. Rove came to Washington as an agent of radical change for the Republican Party and leaves having achieved that change – just not the kind he, nor any Republican, could have wanted.

Perhaps there are political guys to get the candidate elected and policy guys to help him or her govern. You might think the jobs aren’t so dissimilar, but it’s entirely possible that we’re seeing today, in completely different administration, a similar dynamic.

Despite what some top Obama administration officials are saying now, discussions to free the Taliban Five from Guantanamo Bay have been going on for years, even before Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl wandered off and got himself captured. Among the top officials, whose opinions should matter, it was never unanimous that freeing five of the worst of the worst was a good idea, especially among military advisers.

You also might have seen some sentiment this week that sounded like, “Suck it up and salute.” That would have been the non-military types in Obama’s inner circle laying down the way things are for those in uniform.

An overrreliance on political types, over policy types, also might be why Susan Rice has become such a comedy act on Sunday talk shows. After her Benghazi fiasco, you’d think she might take a pass the next hundred or so times someone asked. Instead, she was the one the administration sent out last weekend to say the magic words, that Bergdahl — widely accused of desertion — “served the United States with honor and distinction.”

It was a political desire to sweep the Veterans Administration scandal off the front pages that put President Obama in the Rose Garden with Sgt. Bergdahl’s parents—when Secretary of State John Kerry, or even a press release, would have given distance. It was a political desire to claim a foreign-policy victory that saw Ms. Rice again peddling a phony story, this time about how Sgt. Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction”—when senior officials had to know that was questionable. Who failed to warn the president that Sgt. Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers would surely speak out? Who failed to walk him through the ABCs of the statute he signed requiring Congressional notification, or warn him of the bipartisan fury his cold shoulder would inspire?

Most remarkable is that despite the endless loop of foreign-policy fiascoes, this White House seems oblivious of the need for institutional change. It has had its share of experienced hands (Bob Gates, Leon Panetta) come and go, but shows no evidence it learned from them. In Obama world, there is only politics. And so the world will continue to burn.

You may have thought as much, given the cascade of Democrats in and out of Congress, including the dwindling Barack Obama fan base, that insists at loud volume that the recently chosen House Select Committee is just another Republican waste of time.

What of those four American deaths, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, in what we now know was an organized terrorist attack on our diplomatic outpost? Every question asked and answered, many Democrats bluster. Can’t we discuss something more interesting, current and productive? (The IRS? No, not that. The VA? Not that either. Bowe Bergdahl? No, not anymore. Something else though, please. Pivot to jobs, maybe?)

As it happens, a majority of Americans disagree, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week. (Don’t bother digging through your stack of Dallas Morning News-es; I don’t think you’ll find it there.) Aaron Blake, a national political reporter for The Post, went so far as to use the hallowed “mandate” to describe sentiment for pushing forward on Benghazi.

You be the judge: 51 percent of Americans approve of the new panel, compared to 42 percent who don’t. Blake combines that result with previous polling to reach mandate status.

For what it’s worth, more respondees believe the Obama administration covered things up (58 percent) than favor the new committee. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton takes it on the chin specific to Benghazi, with 50 percent disapproval to 37 percent approval.

Your local editorial board, by the way, stands with the majority (in this case, at least) in favoring the House committee investigation, led by South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy.

Leon Panetta, defense secretary on Sept. 11, 2012, says he welcomes an investigation from a House select committee on Benghazi and hopes members of his Democratic Party participate (SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg)

Nancy Pelosi remains in full dither over whether House Democrats should deign to participate in what many of them see as an unnecessary select committee on what we now know was a terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that Pelosi won’t continue to receive advice until she finally makes her decision clear, assuming that ever happens. Just this week, two men intimately involved in the events before, during and after Sept. 11, 2012, offered their thoughts.

On that night, U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. Leon Panetta was the secretary of defense and Michael Morell the deputy CIA director.

“If you look at the polling numbers a not insignificant percentage of the American people still have questions,” Morell said.

Morell, who said he already has testified four times about Benghazi, said he is 100 percent confident the upcoming investigation will show that allegations “the intelligence community politicized its analysis” are false.

Panetta, a former Central Coast congressman and Democratic Party stalwart, said there needs to be an investigation to lay out the full story to the public. “The problem has been sometimes bits and pieces of information keep coming out” that raise more questions, he said.

Morell, as he noted, played a key role in the analysis of the intelligence both during the attack and for the period prior to it. Panetta was CIA Director when the US and NATO started the bombing campaign that decapitated the Libyan dictatorship, and then was Defense Secretary from June 2011 through the time of the attack, retiring in February 2013. The lack of preparedness for the anniversary of 9/11 would fall on his shoulders, which makes Panetta’s support for the new and unified probe a little surprising. After all, he has plenty of fellow Democrats denouncing the whole idea as unnecessary.

That makes a refusal to cooperate even more untenable than before. If two of the probe’s potential targets have endorsed the select committee, why would House Democrats balk at participating? Perhaps they’re more concerned that the facts will tend to exonerate Panetta and Morell and put the blame directly on State and the White House.

Or maybe that’s giving Pelosi and her leadership crew more credit than they deserve. Because if they really know the answers and are intentionally blocking Americans’ access to the truth, that says even less about them.

If nothing else, perhaps the select committee investigation could disabuse Eleanor Clift of the hilarious notion that dying of smoke inhalation, as she contends Stevens did, isn’t really murder when the fire was ignited by terrorists trying to kill him.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave us “IED” and “drawdown.” Eric Snowden and the National Security Agency gave us “metadata.” The protests that toppled the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak gave us “Arab Spring.”

Now, “off ramp” has become the “It” word of Russia’s military takeover of the Crimea.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Deshchytsia speaks to reporters after a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and other foreign ministers at the Quai d' Orsay in Paris on Wednesday. All are looking for an "off-ramp" to offer Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Since then, it seems hardly a story about the standoff between Russia and the West can be written without the term. It’s almost as if “alternative,” “solution,” and “option,” have been stricken from the vocabulary of western journalists.

“Obama now finds himself racing against the clock to persuade Putin that it’s in his interest not to alienate himself from the West and Ukraine, while at the same time looking for an off-ramp from the crisis that would allow the Russian president to save face on the world stage.”

“Yet another western plan for Ukraine went down in flames today as the Russians blew past the ‘off-ramp’ Washington and its allies had prepared as a way to defuse the crisis.”

The last mention seems particularly relevant. Because the only people who don’t seem to be looking for an “off-ramp” are…the Russians. They’re still talking about “an exit from the crisis,” “relaxed tensions” and a “negotiated solution.”

No wonder there’s been no resolution. It’s hard for two sides to take an off-ramp if they’re not on the same highway.

So…apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech was pretty good. Republican operative Alex Castellanos liked the speech. Apparently a lot more than I did.

President Barack Obama waves to the gallery following the State of the Union address Tuesday.

“A speech by Barack Obama is a lot like sex,” said GOP operative and CNN contributor Alex Castellanos. “The worst there ever was is still excellent.”

Give the man a cigarette.

A poll taken by CNN/ORC International immediately after the speech found 44% of respondents felt “very positive” about the speech, while 32% were “somewhat positive” and 22% didn’t like it at all.

Barack Obama has faced legislative frustration for five years either (choose based on ideology) because he has…
A. Been inept in working with Congress.
B. Faced a Congress so intransigent it borders on being suicidal.

Either way, there have been too many State of the Union speeches with too many unmet promises and unrealized dreams. So, faced with that reality, what President Barack did was choose honesty in his State of the Union address. In a fairly accurate assessment of the state of governing in the country, Obama didn’t set the country off toward new frontiers or make sweeping, aspirational statements.

He acknowledged the problem (we’re at political loggerheads) and offered his solution (taking unilateral action whenever possible).

Some say the speech was lacking in vision and substance. I say it was realistic. After all, how can you have true substance when you can’t get legislation passed?

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) reacts to a broadly smiling Vice President Joe Biden during President Barack Obama's State of the Union address.

Where the speech was strongest was in its political context. In many ways, this was a speech for the 2014 mid-term elections as much as it was about the state of the country. And in that way, the speech was exceptional for one primary reason: Obama co-opted the word that Republicans always hope to own: opportunity.

“Opportunity is who we are,” said the son of a single mother. And the Republican Speaker of the House and son of a barkeep had to applaud.

It’s worth pointing out that Obama didn’t use the term “income inequality” once. A very smart political move that Democrats would do well to emulate in the coming months. “Income inequality” is lefty manifesto stuff. Opportunity is a red-white-and-blue word if I’ve ever heard one. Even if, in this context where the two terms might mean the same thing, “opportunity” conveys hard work. Industriousness.

God bless capitalism. And opportunity.

The day after the State of the Union speech, as he speaks at a Costco wholesale store about many of the policy proposals he articulated during his speech, a banner trumpets "Opportunity for all," a phrase President Barack Obama used in the speech.

Being a Republican, and giving the official Republican response, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-Wash.) also referenced “opportunity.” And she also did a good job in her speech. Only problem was, there were two other Republican responses. One by the Tea Party faction, delivered by Sen. Mike Lee R-Utah), and another by the Rand Paul faction of the Republican Party, delivered, of course, by Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).

And that, in a video nutshell, is the problem – not just for Republicans, but the country. A party so riven and lacking strong leadership becomes an impediment to the functioning of government.

We’re moving into end-of-the-year territory, with seemingly endless lists chronicling the best of this or worst of that for 2013. My favorite (outside of our own Texan of the Year, of course) may be Politifact’s 2013 Lie of the Year.

Pundits and politicians’ lies. Talk about a rich vein for end-of-the-year mining. The biggest problem with that category would be honing in on a top 10. But Politifact – the Tampa Bay Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking website – was somehow able to whittle down the lies to a manageable 10 whopper falsehoods.

Nine of the 10 finalists received the website’s lowest honor – a “pants on fire” designation. Ted Cruz’s assertion that all of Congress was granted an exemption from Obamacare only received a “false.” Our junior U.S. Senator once again swims against the current.

President Barack Obama meets with navigators in Dallas who were hired to help people enroll through HealthCare.gov.

As the subject of six of the top-10 entries, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, seemed to be the overwhelming focus of distortion:

* “No doctors who went to an American medical school will be accepting Obamacare.”

– Ann Coulter on Wednesday, October 9th.

* “Obamacare will question your sex life.”

– Betsy McCaughey, Sunday, September 15th.

* Obamacare provision will allow “forced home inspections” by government agents.

– Bloggers, Thursday, August 15th.

* Says “President Obama just granted all of Congress an exception” to Obamacare.

– Ted Cruz, Saturday, August 10th.

* Says the word “Dhimmitude” is on page 107 of the health care law and means “Muslims are specifically exempted from the government mandate to purchase insurance.”

– Chain email, Wednesday, May 29th.

* The IRS is going to be “in charge” of “a huge national database” on health care that will include Americans’ “personal, intimate, most close-to-the-vest-secrets.”

– Michele Bachmann, Wednesday, May 15th.

Talk about misinformation carpet-bombing. Which might explain why President Barack Obama tossed out his own L-bomb – the one I am handicapping to handily win the Politifact 2013 LOY honors:

“What we said was, you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

– Barack Obama, Monday, November 4th.

The POTUS was the only person on the list to have two entries. On June 17th, he also threw out this doozie: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “is transparent.”

Be proud, America.

Politifact offers readers a chance to select a “Readers’ Choice” pick, but just as with the TOY, its writers and editors ultimately make their own official selection. Go to Politifact website and support your favorite lie.

As in, “Who knew such a thing could happen? Who could have predicted this?”

James O’Keefe, known nationally for similar video that targeted ACORN, said the video released Tuesday — of Obamacare workers in Dallas and Irving — is the first of several to come that expose Affordable Care Act abuses. “This investigation shows just how vulnerable Obamacare is to fraud,” he said.

O’Keefe’s involvement could raise eyebrows, since he’s a conservative activist and such behavior is only allowed in the opposite direction. However, the latest video doesn’t appear fabricated, if only because the Urban League of Greater Dallas quickly announced disciplinary actions against four Obamacare workers.

The league said it has suspended three of the women, who it said were still in training to be navigators. It also fired a trainee receptionist at its Irving office. In the video’s first 10 seconds, she urges an undercover applicant not to mention that he occasionally smokes.

“You lie because your premiums will be higher,” the receptionist says. “I always lie on mine.”

The league said the comment “represented her personal opinion, not that of our organization.”

A would-be navigator at the Irving office also took part in the smoking conversation.

In a separate visit, two other “navigators in training” at the league’s Dallas office apparently told the applicant that he shouldn’t list income from odd jobs that he has not reported on his federal return.

All three of the navigator trainees are still under investigation, the league said.

First, Fund cites Michael Astrue, commissioner of Social Security until earlier this year and in the 1990s general counsel for Health and Human Services. Astrue wrote this Oct. 21:

HHS opened the door to large-scale fraud by providing funding for tens of thousands of “navigators”—people who are supposed to persuade the uninsured to apply for coverage and then assist them in the application process. Instead of hiring well-screened, well-trained, and well-supervised workers, HHS decided to build political support for the Affordable Care Act by pouring money into supportive organizations so they could launch poorly trained workers into their communities without obtaining criminal background checks or creating systems for monitoring their activities.

As a practical matter, these navigators are unaccountable, and yet they will be asking people for Social Security numbers and other sensitive information. It will not take long for navigators to become predators, and HHS has no plan to deal with the new breed of predators it is creating. The somnolent HHS inspector general has been silent about this scheme that will inflict widespread fraud and identity theft on vulnerable Americans.

If you liked ACORN, you’ll love the Obamacare Navigators. I’m sure there will be good, sincere people who really want to help people navigate the Obamacare maze. But there will be enough bad apples employed as navigators to supply plenty of scary anecdotes and weird encounters that will result in a steady ridicule of the overall program. And there will no doubt be activists with hidden cameras ready to capture a few creepy and outrageous encounters that will grab everybody’s attention and make voters even more skeptical of Obamacare.

This story, despite its local angle, didn’t rise to Page One in this morning’s Dallas Morning News (and was covered out of our Austin Bureau). Our story did have this passage worth comment:

The video’s release set off Republican cries of outrage over the federal law’s “navigator” program, in which workers hired under federal grants help people sign up for insurance in new online state marketplaces.

Why only “Republican cries of outrage”? Look, I think this is a bad law rolled out in the worst possible way, so I’m not the guy to ask. But why aren’t the law’s supporters — Democrats, liberals, that bunch — even more outraged? Aren’t liars, frauds and cheats the last things you need right about now?

Rafael Cruz, a pastor from Carrollton and father of Sen. Ted Cruz, speaks at a meeting of the Heritage Foundation, at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas in August.

How someone, born outside of this country and allowed to live here by the grace and generosity of the American people, could say a native-born American should be “sent back to (pick a country, any country),” is beyond me.

As a Cuban-born American and an almost-namesake, Rafael Cruz makes me want to…change my name.

Baucus, chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee and a key architect of President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, announced last spring that he was hanging ‘em up after six terms as a senator from Montana.

Before he left, though, he famously offered the quote that would launch a thousand dire warnings about the Affordable Care Act: “I just see a huge train wreck coming down. You and I have discussed this many times, and I don’t see any results yet.”

That was at an April committee hearing on Obamacare implementation. Here are two bits of irony:

In September, Baucus had himself a little chuckle as he conceded that he no longer predicted trains flying off the tracks. He said what he said for effect, out of genuine concern that the rollout was in jeopardy. Less than a month before the Oct. 1 launch, he was satisfied.

“We’ll see Oct. 1, but I think they are doing a pretty good job,” Baucus said in an interview with Fox Business Network. “I think the train is going to keep running, maybe not totally on time, but it’s going to be pretty efficient.”

The other irony is from Baucus’ original quote. The someone he was addressing — “You and I have discussed this many times …” — was Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama administration official whose primary responsibility for the last three-plus years has been on display since Oct. 1.

Today, Sebelius is dodging further congressional scrutiny, although her office says she fully intends to testify “next week,” after she clears more important items from her calendar. So a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing into her No. 1 project apparently will go forward Thursday without her perspective and expertise.

Go ahead, kick an elderly couple out of their home because it sits on federal land. Expend more time, energy and resources to fake-close the World War II Memorial in Washington than just to leave it alone.

The government shutdown is putting a strain on breweries across the country and in North Texas after an obscure federal agency that quietly approves new breweries, recipes and labels closed.

The shutdown could create huge delays throughout the rapidly growing craft industry, whose customers expect a constant supply of inventive and seasonal beers.

The setback comes just months after Texas lawmakers helped clear the way for craft brewery businesses to sell their products to consumers on-site.

But now, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, or TTB, has shut down. The little-known arm of the Treasury Department will continue to process taxes from existing permit holders, but applications for new breweries or beers are on hold.

Obviously, this isn’t to the stupidity level of, say, withholding death benefits to families of U.S. military members. Yet, it’s pretty stupid, isn’t it?

So instead of the usual 100 or so days it takes to rouse a federal agency to approve a new seasonal craft beer, applications could go unanswered for years. Decades, even.

Then again, Reader Mike (no relation) actually beat me to what should be the real question: “Why is the federal government in the business of approving labels and recipes?”

President Barack Obama tells the nation he isn't interested in "style points," which is a good thing given his meanderings on Syria policy. (AP Photo/ABC)

Seemingly long ago, before other news events interceded, commentators of some reputation were wondering just how badly President Barack Obama’s slapstick handling of U.S. policy toward Syria would harm his administration and second term.

Oh, sure, much of the fire came from the right, those conservatives, libertarians and
Republicans disinclined to ever give Obama a break, to ever see things his way. Beyond expected, their criticisms were easily dismissed as partisan.

What’s interesting — or surprising — is that some of the snarkiest mocking actually came from people normally inclined to toe the administration’s line on, well, just about everything. No style points, indeed.

As presidential spin, this is insulting. As presidential conviction — if this is what he really believes — it’s scary. [...]

Second, presidential actions have ripples beyond ripples. Obama may have lucked — or his secretary of state accidentally may have stumbled — into an approach that averted “The Perils of Pauline” moment. But the indecision, the mind-changing, the lurching — and, note, Obama did not dispute such characterizations so much as dismiss them — have consequences.

Obama risks getting stuck with a rap as toxic as an unpopular war or a troubled economy: incompetence. … On public diplomacy, Obama is failing. There is no coherent message, little explanation of the complexities and contradictions created by difficult circumstances. By taking on the role of the agonizingly reluctant warrior on Syria, he has reinforced the country’s skepticism.

Amateur hour started when Obama dithered on Syria and failed to explain the stakes there. It escalated last August with a slip by the methodical wordsmith about “a red line for us” — which the president and Kerry later tried to blur as the world’s red line, except the world was averting its eyes.

Obama’s flip-flopping, ambivalent leadership led him to the exact place he never wanted to be: unilateral instead of unified.

The President knows this, which makes his words and gestures during the weeks leading up to his Syria speech all the more perplexing. He willingly jumped into a bear trap of his own creation. In the process, he has damaged his presidency and weakened the nation’s standing in the world. It has been one of the more stunning and inexplicable displays of presidential incompetence that I’ve ever witnessed.

Klein, especially, is worth a full read. He sounds almost heartbroken.

UHLA: “The Kerry thing. International control of Syria’s chemical weapons. Russia’s in. Syria’s in. POTUS doesn’t have to get lit up in Congress on the vote. We don’t have to bomb.”

S: “We don’t have to bomb?”

UHLA: “We don’t have to bomb.”

S: “No bombing?”

UHLA: “No bombing.”

S: “Right. Fine. You know this is like the sixth draft you guys have asked for. You change your minds every day. Now we’re going with John Kerry, you know, off the cuff?”

UHLA: “Hey, worse things have happened. You know what’s worse? Losing. Have you seen the whip counts? The polls? I’ll take a face-saving tie any day.”

S: “Is that what this is, a tie? Putin is the friend-of-peace statesman. POTUS looks like Ted Mack. Assad keeps killing, only with guns and tanks and planes. And, you know, I hate to bring this up, but what about the ‘red line’? What about American credibility? What about every selling point we tried before today?”

UHLA: “Look, did you really want to write that rally-the-country, common-cause, national security thing? The Kerry thing is a gift. We go from ‘unbelievably small‘ to this in a matter of minutes? Brother, there’s some real genius there.”

S: “Jeez, whatever. You guys do understand that this won’t make any sense to anyone who’s been paying attention, right?”

UHLA: “Live to fight another day, brother. Draft copy in an hour.”

S: [Unintelligible profanity.] “Fine. Fine. Hey, are you guys sure we shouldn’t wait to see what Kerry says tomorrow? Maybe we’ll just skip Syria and bomb Iran. Or Russia. Or China. How about that?”

"How will missiles launched into Syria affect me, Al Franken?" Now that he's a U.S. senator, he gets a vote. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

It should be a fabulous and fascinating weekend in the capital as members of Congress not already in town return to Washington for Monday’s fall session puck drop.

And for the ones who still gather their own luggage off the carousel, they should expect from that moment to receive a full-force White House lobbying blitz that will follow them to their D.C.-area homes, camp out on their front lawns and then follow them to the office.

It’s Authorize Use of Force in Syria Weekend!

In truth, the Obama administration has quite a hill to climb, if you’ve been following along with the amateur “whip counts.” Right now, it’s roughly could-go-either-way in the Democratic-led Senate and down something like 5-to-1 in the Republican-led House.

The latest lawmaker of local interest to declare is Rep. Kay Granger, a Fort Worth Republican and chair of an Appropriations subcommittee that controls much of the State Department’s budget.

Granger said she has consulted with Secretary of State John Kerry and other top administration officials. Since the president announced last Saturday that he would seek congressional approval for a strike to punish Syria’s regime for a poison gas attack last month, she said, hundreds of constituents have expressed their doubts in emails and phone calls and in person.

“There remain very serious questions about what the mission is and the possible consequences. These are not just my concerns. They are the concerns of the people I represent,” Granger said.

Todd reports that Granger makes it 22 of 36 Texans in the House either voting no or strongly leaning that way. Two Democrats, Henry Cuellar and Sheila Jackson Lee, are said to be leaning yes.

Finally, this president showed determination and guts in getting Osama bin Laden. But a Syria strike may become full-scale war. Is Barack Obama a war president? On Syria he has done nothing to inspire confidence. Up to the moment of decision, and even past it, he has seemed ambivalent, confused, unaware of the implications of his words and stands. From the “red line” comment to the “shot across the bow,” from the White House leaks about the nature and limits of a planned strike to the president’s recent, desperate inclusion of Congress, he has seemed consistently over his head. I have been thinking of the iconic image of American military leadership, Emanuel Leutze’s painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” There Washington stands, sturdy and resolute, looking toward the enemy on the opposite shore. If you imagine Mr. Obama in that moment he is turned, gesturing toward those in the back. “It’s not my fault we’re in this boat!” That’s what “I didn’t set a red line” and “My credibility is not at stake” sounded like.

But going to war — and however narrowly “tailored” the mission, that is what we as a nation are debating — needs to be demonstrably in this country’s interest.

President Obama has not yet established that case to anything approaching the satisfaction of his fellow Americans. He may do so in the days and weeks ahead — time he also can exploit to insist on United Nations involvement in avenging, and ending, the horror show in Syria. If Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to veto U.N. action, and make slaughter in Syria his wholly owned subsidiary, at least he’ll have done so in public.

Obama and even the morally clear Kerry have spent far more time (1) telling us what they won’t do in this strike and (2) what they do not intend to accomplish. Here’s hoping the president has his speechwriters give him some strong copy Tuesday night on what he will do and what he plans to get done.

After personal exchanges with dozens of active and retired soldiers in recent days, I feel confident that what follows represents the overwhelming opinion of serving professionals who have been intimate witnesses to the unfolding events that will lead the United States into its next war.

They are embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it. So far, at least, this path to war violates every principle of war, including the element of surprise, achieving mass and having a clearly defined and obtainable objective.

They are repelled by the hypocrisy of a media blitz that warns against the return of Hitlerism but privately acknowledges that the motive for risking American lives is our “responsibility to protect” the world’s innocents. Prospective U.S. action in Syria is not about threats to American security. The U.S. military’s civilian masters privately are proud that they are motivated by guilt over slaughters in Rwanda, Sudan and Kosovo and not by any systemic threat to our country.

I don’t know Scales well enough to say, but I’d bet he’s neither a conservative isolationist nor an extremist.

First of all, I didn’t set a red line; the world set a red line. The world set a red line when governments representing 98 percent of the world’s population said the use of chemical weapons are abhorrent and passed a treaty forbidding their use even when countries are engaged in war.

Congress set a red line when it ratified that treaty. Congress set a red line when it indicated that — in a piece of legislation titled the Syria Accountability Act — that some of the horrendous things that are happening on the ground there need to be answered for.

And so when I said in a press conference that my calculus about what’s happening in Syria would be altered by the use of the chemical weapons, which the overwhelming consensus of humanity says is wrong, that wasn’t something I just kind of made up. I didn’t pluck it out of thin air. There’s a reason for it. That’s point number one.

Point number two — my credibility is not on the line. The international community’s credibility is on the line. And America and Congress’s credibility is on the line because we give lip service to the notion that these international norms are important.

That was President Barack Obama speaking yesterday in Stockholm, answering a reporter’s question about Syria and his credibility. So in pushing back against the isolation of his Coalition of 1.5 with France, did Obama deny his own words from about a year ago when he was running hard for re-election?

I have, at this point, not ordered military engagement in the situation. But the point that you made about chemical and biological weapons is critical. That’s an issue that doesn’t just concern Syria; it concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us. We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people.

We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.

Q So you’re confident it’s somehow under — it’s safe?

THE PRESIDENT: In a situation this volatile, I wouldn’t say that I am absolutely confident. What I’m saying is we’re monitoring that situation very carefully. We have put together a range of contingency plans. We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons. That would change my calculations significantly.

I can’t believe we’re going to spend time debating the meaning of “us.”

Actually, there’s a way for Obama to argue that his two statements do not contradict. He could point out that all that treaty and congressional law stuff is so well known and understood, he didn’t believe he needed to get into it back in August 2012, when he mentioned the whole “red line” thing.

He could do that to a televised joint session of Congress or in a televised address from the Oval Office, as he makes his case to, well, everyone who opposes him. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll this week, that would be Republicans, Democrats and independents, all by double-digit margins.

Governing by poll is not leadership, no, but polls like this can influence legislators who have spent recent weeks in their districts, hearing roughly the same thing from constituents. And since Obama insists his surprising decision to take the Syria question to Congress was no “empty exercise,” it seems like a fight worth winning.

To him. To the world. To someone.

Based on my risk-reward equation, this attack is a lousy idea. But so was Libya, and look how well (sarcasm alert) that turned out. I’m not sure why I must be the only one who learned all those lessons we supposedly learned from Iraq (and Afghanistan), but I’ll leave the hawks to their hawking, for now.

“Leadership sometimes means stepping forward for what’s right, even when no one else follows,” we wrote. If the U.N. Security Council, the Arab League, the U.S. Congress and the world’s nations (other than France) are among those refusing to follow, then what?

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